Plasticity and Pathology by Bates David; Bassiri Nima; & Nima Bassiri

Plasticity and Pathology by Bates David; Bassiri Nima; & Nima Bassiri

Author:Bates, David; Bassiri, Nima; & Nima Bassiri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-01-17T16:00:00+00:00


A World Shattered, a World Remade

ALTHOUGH THE MAN with a Shattered World is almost universally read in the West as inaugurating the genre of the “romantic” “neurological novel” that supports the reintegration and reformation of the liberal humanist individual, such an interpretation denudes this narrative of plasticity of its status as an object of history. Zasetsky, the case history’s protagonist-patient, is certainly driven by a desperate desire to heal and to reintegrate into society, but the narrative’s preoccupation with overcoming obstacles, of determined striving toward a final moment of reconciliation, is also definitively tied to its Soviet context. Indeed the text stages a dialectical tension between woundedness and healing, fragmentation and unity, that overwhelmingly conforms to the master plot of a socialist realist novel. Katerina Clark discusses the socialist realist novel as ritual—a cultural form and social act through which meaning and national myths were generated, consolidated, and sustained. The socialist realist master plot permeated and organized everyday discourse, and the genre proved remarkably consistent from its official inception at the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress up to the Brezhnev era, when Luria wrote his case history. Clark explains, “The formulaic signs of the Soviet novel . . . proved . . . tenacious over time. . . . The master plot . . . is the literary expression of the master categories that organise the entire culture.”49

Unlike nineteenth-century realism, socialist realism was never intended as a mirror of the present; it was figured more like a window onto the future. From this tension between what is and what ought to be, the narrative derives its relentless forward-moving drive. The socialist realist novel is dynamic, with an emphasis on the ongoing struggle to shape and build communism, to bring a new reality into being, while the hero embodies the Marxist-Leninist account of history. The questing protagonist undergoes a transformation, which Clark characterizes as a working out of the dialectic between spontaneity and consciousness, the movement famously discussed by Lenin in his 1902 text What Is to Be Done? Over the course of the novel the hero masters himself, seizes his own form, and eventually achieves harmony with the movement of history.

The Man with a Shattered World at least attempts to trace a similar movement. The case history describes a heroic man—Luria explicitly describes him as such throughout50—struggling with almost superhuman effort and determination to overcome his own infirmity: “This book describes the damage done to a man’s life by a bullet that penetrated his brain. Although he made every conceivable effort to recover his past, and thereby have some chance of a future, the odds were overwhelmingly against him. Yet I think there is a sense in which he may be said to have triumphed. The real author is its hero.” But Zasetsky’s acute sense of loss is not merely individual; it is also framed in terms of his sense of disaffiliation from society. He expresses regret that he can no longer “be of some service to my country” through work;



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